Forsaken Lands

First off, I have been extremely pleased with the reception of Sacrifice. Sales of both the sequel and the first book have been way better than ever, and folks seem to be enjoying it. 🙂 It is absolutely thrilling to have the story out in the hands of readers. Go-go 21st century freedom of information!

Seriously, it’s awesome. I’m downright stoked.

As with the previous novel, I’m doing a brief post about the music which inspired Sacrifice. I will never cease to marvel at the interconnectedness of creative people – painters inspired by writers, musicians inspired by story, writers inspired by music – it’s a phenomenon of cosmic proportions, if you ask me. We all have so much to share with one another, and that is the beauty of all that is art.

For me, no words reach the page without music. I cannot write in silence. Some of my work has been inspired directly by songs – Fathers and Sons came to me while listening to Say When by The Fray (specifically the lyrics, “you’re coming to but you’re slow in waking/you start to shake/you still haven’t spoken, what happened?” “maybe god can be on both sides of a gun,” and “my own two hands will comfort you tonight/say when/my own two arms will carry you tonight”). I can’t tell you how powerfully I’ve felt those lyrics through Garren’s story.

Thus I give you the following songs that inspired Sacrifice (among others I listened to along the way). As I pulled them from my playlist I realized that I don’t listen to many female artists. Huh.

The world lies in pieces in the aftermath of Nivenea’s Fall. Captured and held against their will, Teveres and Aia’s only hope is that their friends may have survived a deadly battle, while Les, the lowly Baron of Pelle, finds himself thrown in with a ragtag militia on the losing side of a war. Separated from all they once knew, the Deldri must learn to trust not only their former enemies, but also themselves…or risk the destruction of their nation.

I am SO happy to have this thing out! It took 2 years and much angst, and…I hope you like it. Reviews are so important for indie authors, so if you like it (or even if you don’t) please review on Amazon or GoodReads. Giveaways and more material to come. 🙂 The print-edition always takes more formatting work and will be available in the next couple of weeks barring unforeseen complications.

For now I’m going to slip away into the morning, drink my hot cocoa, and hang out with one of my favorite people and her little one. In the meantime, here’s a little excerpt from early in the piece –

A hard object hit glass on the other side of the concrete, loud enough to be heard in the control room. Kali rushed to look through the spyglass. Her mouth dropped.

“Guards, now!” Kali shouted. She hit a button on her station.

“Let me see.” With a grunt, Zhe pushed Kali out of the way to get her own assessment of the situation. She felt the crack in her cool facade when she registered what was going on. Her eyebrows raised.

Through the fisheye lens she saw the Eastern man – this Teveres person – slumped with his back against the two-way mirror. The muscles in his neck were strained from fury and pain; he gasped for breath, his words punctuated by sobs.

<Just make it stop!> Zhe heard him say in Leyvada. Defiant, he turned and slammed his body face-on against the mirror again, letting his skull take the force of the impact. Zhe prized her desensitization to the pain of others, but the impact of a body thrown against a wall still made her stomach lurch.

Way back in her private musings, she admired the dedication. Self-injury on such a scale required quite a bit of willpower.

Behind her she heard the guards running to meet them. Kali went after them with a medi bag in hand, as if she’d been waiting for exactly this kind of event. Zhe had a moment of hesitation considering that the prisoner was one of the single most dangerous individuals on the planet – going into the room meant sacrificing the protective shielding that separated the cell from the control room.

The pause was overridden by her training. She experienced no fear, only excitement at the thought of the challenge. She caught up with the group just as they began putting on the gas masks hanging on the wall outside the prison door. Zhe gave Kali an inquisitive eye.

“I released anesthetic gas,” Kali explained quickly, situating her own mask. “He’s usually a lot easier to control than this…never tries to hurt himself…I never thought he’d actually…” The scientist spoke of the prisoner fondly again. It just wouldn’t do.

Zhe selected a mask for herself, covering her face and eyes with the ghastly-looking apparatus. She hated the things. They made the air taste like industrial plastic.

When the guards crowded the doorway, Zhe shouldered into the middle of them. Two of the guards were women about her height (which wasn’t saying much), while the third guard, a male, seemed to double her in size.

Teveres was mid-launch with his back to the mirror when the guards rushed him.

<Let me pay…> Teveres grit his teeth, anticipating the pain. When he slammed into mirror again, a spiderweb crack dripping with blood haloed around his head. His eyes went glazed and unfocused. <…for what I’ve done.>

One guard each took hold of his arms while the third, the largest man in the group, dove for Teveres’s legs. He did not struggle, his body limp in their arms.

“Be careful with him,” Kali urged, motioning the guards to bring the prisoner back to his steel table.

Zhe edged towards the prisoner. He was actively bleeding from the back of his head, his eyes fixed up at the ceiling. Whatever his motivations, they were strong enough to keep him fighting the anesthetic gas. When his eyelids began to drift closed his whole body tensed as if in convulsion, rattling down against the table with fists clenched.

Teveres went still, visibly fighting the pull towards unconsciousness. His eyes were pretty, Zhe had to admit. They were a kind of gilded green, deep and dark. If she were to fuck a man, as unlikely as that might be, she’d like it to be a man with the same eyes.

<What did you think you were doing?> Zhe addressed Teveres in perfect Leyvada. She supposed that reassurance might have some kind of place in this situation, but she wasn’t a reassuring kind of person. Instead she cleared her throat. <You’ll have to do a lot better than that if you’re trying to kill yourself.>

<Just…let me go…don’t know…what you want…> His voice was hoarse.

He was at the breaking point. Zhe could see it on his features, the same barely-collected expression she wore when she was sent to train at The Facility. Had this one never been broken before? She knew his history at least in brief, how he’d witnessed the death of his family and killed a dozen people out of pure fury. Reports said that not even half a year ago he had terminated his ex-partner’s fetus to save the lives of his friends. She assumed that a man who endured so much loss would have been broken and callused over long ago.

Zhe thought to speak again, but was too late. The very pretty eyes closed, the muscles unclenched. He finally succumbed to the sedation.

“I shouldn’t have let him up so much,” Kali said distantly, folding her arms as if suddenly chilled. The prisoner’s breaths came slow and steady. “I started to trust him too much. I knew he was under stress but I didn’t expect…I should’ve told Sat that I just wouldn’t do it…I…”

Zhe considered her words carefully before speaking, a pretense she rarely had to employ. Usually the right words came out easily – the right words in her business were usually lies. “These people can’t be trusted with their own choices. That’s why the consultants decided on manipulation strategy rather than coercion. I was there,” Zhe paused, realizing that her matter-of-fact report could hardly be seen as friendly. “I’m sure you won’t let that happen again.” Well, that wasn’t very friendly either. It would just have to do.

Summer is upon us and I am no longer an intern! Slowly but surely things are starting to get polished up and put together for Forsaken Lands 2. To keep the new words flowing, I have been working on a short story featuring a new character named Dmiri – I thought I’d share a clip from the rough draft in the absence of inspiration to blog anything else recently. I hope you like him as much as I do. 😉

I’m not a nervous person – at least, that’s what I tell myself. I’ve been a part of the Celet military since I was eight years old – 24 years. Absent gods, does that make me feel old.

I pride myself on being calm and well-conducted under pressure, but with the way I was wearing a four-finger dent in my desk with my incessant rap, rap, rap on the wood, any bystander would assume I was plagued with the mental disease. I was starting to wonder that about myself. Perhaps I misjudged my vices all these years.

I was grateful when there was a knock at the door to my quarters. I laced my fingers together in the hope that they would calm themselves. “Come in,” I called.

The door clicked open to reveal my visitor, Second Eling-Mai Nyugen. Fully clad in the Celet officer blues with her dark hair pulled back in a severe-looking bun, Mai was totally within aesthetic regulations. Her pistolet hung at her side practically halfway down her leg – though Mai was small even among the Celet people, she carried with her an imposing presence. Her thin fingers rested on the grip of her weapon, a sure sign of her own apprehension. She had nothing to fear inside this room; it was what waited for us outside on the previously-unknown outpost called ‘Zhyra’ which set her nerves on edge.

True to protocol, Mai closed the door and stood just beyond its threshold, waiting for my instructions.

I waved at her inelegantly. “I think we’re well beyond rules by now, don’t you?”

Mai’s shoulders remained stiff and strong when she approached my desk and sat down. I imagined I looked a wreck in my rumpled two-day-old uniform with sleeves pulled up over my elbows. I hadn’t properly slept in as much time, of course. The mess of classified documents I’d managed to procure from one of the shipments we dropped off two weeks ago were sprawled out in front of me, marked up by my own hand so haphazardly that even I couldn’t read it.

Mai’s sharp eyes took all of it in with one sweep. Her cheek twitched.

“The watchers are reporting land,” she told me. “We’ll be there by sundown, unless you’d like to postpone.”

“Is that what you want to do? Postpone?”

“I…” Mai trailed off uncharacteristically. She shook her head. “I just thought I should ask before we proceed.”

I couldn’t fight the smile. I tried to straighten up, pulling the wrinkles out of my uniform jacket. “This is still a voluntary mission. You can still go belowdeck. I will happily call you my prisoner.”

I might have been hallucinating, but I thought I saw her fight off a smile. Instead she just blinked. “And you can still turn this ship around.”

Non-answer. “Mai, I’m asking you as your friend – are you sure you want to go down for this?”

“If I wanted to abandon the Resolute I would have jumped off at Tayk like everyone else,” she caught herself just in time, “sir.”

“In as many years as we’ve known each other you still can’t call me Dmiri,” I mused. Ever since we’d graduated from the academy together she used my rank or title when speaking to me. I supposed that was partly my fault for keeping people at a comfortable distance. My reputation amongst the fleet was a good one – I was trusted, even liked by most, yet I could count on one hand the number of people who might really know me.

Mai would be one of those people. She knew me all too well. She pressed her lips together – clearly my attempts at distraction were not appreciated.

“Dmiri,” her voice lowered, the use of my name so surprising that I jumped and hit my knee against my desk. She acted as if she didn’t notice. “Are you sure you want to go down for this?”

I couldn’t hold her gaze; instead I rested my eyes on the papers. The sting of fatigue jabbed me with each blink. She asked a question I’d been asking myself constantly since I saw that cage.

I swallowed. Damn and hell, this anxiety issue would kill me. I tried to grin. “They cannot court martial a legend.”

Mai replied with a grunt of disapproval. “Not all of us are legends.”

“They will be reasonable,” I told her, and impressed myself with how confident I sounded. It was a skill I’d had since I was too young – I could convince and charm people by making them think I knew what I was doing. What I’d learned by practicing this skill was that I was not the only one pretending; in reality, no one knows that they are right. Leadership is a costume, nothing more. “We’re just asking questions.”

Mai, of course, knew this secret too. Her dark eyes sparkled silent understanding. “You should change,” she remarked, standing and folding her arms behind her back. “I will bring us in.”

She half-bowed to me, as was custom, and turned to leave. “Mai?” my voice crackled. I would need to exorcise my uncertainty before I showed my face to the rest of the crew, let alone to my adversaries.

Mai looked at me over one shoulder. “Yes, Dmiri?” her own voice was soft.

“Thank you.”

The silence between us felt warm, if just for that moment.

“Captain,” she said curtly, then disappeared beyond the door.

Friendly interactions over. Time to get back to business. When I stood my muscles ached, and not with good reason – they ached from sitting, keeping my spine jammed vertical in a chair for much too long. I traced a finger along one piece of paper, despairing at how little my work had won me.

Codewords and cooked numbers. The ledgers were full of shipments marked as if they were simple supplies – food, water, containers, bandages. Deep in the paperwork was much darker stuff: thousands of bullets, hundreds of weapons, and medical equipment I wasn’t qualified to judge. Jamming devices – a few dozen of them – more than the entire continent had produced in a decade. The military hadn’t employed jamming devices since the Rice-Wheat Uprising nearly fifty years ago.

Goods befitting a peaceful mission of resource-gathering they were not.

I strode across the room, fussing with the buttons on my jacket. One of them popped off, clattering on the floor. I didn’t bother to hunt after it. The jacket, undershirt, and pants hit the deck just before I reached my bathing suite.

A cool shower would focus my mind. The light clicked on in the cramped space, and I was greeted with my reflection, inescapable from the position of the showerhead.

I could deceive myself into believing I was less vain than the masses, but this would be folly. For all I felt like a jaded old man, I was still young, particularly for my position. The bits of gray peeking out from my slightly-too-long-for-regulations black hair were my penance. I was the youngest captain of a Class 1 naval vessel in Celet history, a journey requiring a level of physical training and academic rigor which most people would find unreasonable. I could have saved the stress and accepted the usual course in life, and I would have arrived in the very same position just five years in the future. No one would have been disappointed.

No one, that is, except me.

I turned the knobs, tensing when the frigid water coursed over my forehead, my chest, my back, a procession of shivers jolting me from my anxious fog. Ideas of what would or would not happen when I set foot on the Zhyra outpost fled from me. Speculation wasted energy, anyway.

For all I would tell anyone who asked otherwise, I still wished I could have achieved what I did without inviting the gray in my hair.

Blackness. Nothing but the feel of her – skin smooth, muscles tensing beneath a layer of lush softness. A mouth covered his, and hands found their way up over his shoulders to wrap around his neck. The length of her –– and sweet gods above, the way she molded to him – pressed against every inch of him. They were bare flesh on flesh, tantalizing and wonderful; everything he ever imagined.

They kissed: long, hard, and passionate; the way he’d always imagined. His heart thudded in his ears, the heat of pleasure and pure wantspread to the tips of his fingers. His grip tightened.

He gasped when Aia’s hands fanned over his chest, pushing him down onto the steel table. When he opened his eyes he saw only her face, wide cheekbones framing a mischievous smile. Lavender eyes locked onto his.

“Skies,” he growled, reaching to pull her down on top of him. Ringlets of maroon hair brushed his face, tumbling from her shoulders. He wanted to be with her, in her, around her, beyond anything-–

Teveres awoke to an intense burning sensation deep in his right hand. Pain shattered the fragile gift of sleep.Though he wanted nothing more than to drown out his existence with unconsciousness, sleep came all too seldom. His sole companion in this strange place, The Cold Steel Table, was not very welcoming of his fantasies; its unyielding angles drove them far away.

He wished that he could go far away – anywhere.

Pain was becoming his constant master. As awareness drifted back to his body, physical sensations returned in sequence. First was the new pain – the burning in his hand where the needle-ended tube entered his skin. There was sharpness like a knife in his upper back and a lancing pain in his side that raged every time he took a deep breath. His naked skin was always freezing against Cold Steel. Blankets, apparently, were of low priority in this prison. A machine whirred softly in the background, along with the sound of bubbles…

The sound of bubbles that followed him for these past weeks – months? – was conspicuously missing. Slowly, slowly his head was clearing, and he realized that Cold Steel was folded into a chair-like configuration. Straps pressed tight against his chest and abdomen, holding his arms to his sides. Something has changed.

The next step – opening his eyes – came with a great cost. Seeing the inside of his cell, three walls of cement and a fourth made of a mirror, was a serial disappointment. The outline of the door in the mirror taunted him, absent of hinges or handles. As near as he could tell, his captors were ghosts. They never showed their faces; items appeared and disappeared, whatever they drugged him with changed to suit their liking, and not once had he seen their faces.

Today he faced the mirror. He hated to look at himself anymore, but from his position it was hard to avoid. The man in the mirror was a grim sight indeed, hardly resembling the man he was when he left his home in Ilvan nearly a year ago. His travels leading up to his imprisonment made him thin, but not emaciated; when he saw himself now he was skeletal. His skin was pale and his cheeks sunken. While his muscle mass had not disappeared – he had not been here quite that long – his collarbones, wrists and ribs were much easier to trace beneath the skin.

Examining his own image more closely he noticed a small, stitched-over wound on his right side where a tube used to be. His chest ached with each breath. There was a new item behind him, a small box with dials and buttons similar to some of the devices he had seen the engineers working with in Nivenea. Metal wires from the box snaked up to stick painlessly to his forehead.

Two facts about his situation were particularly unnerving: first,that the tube-and-bubble-machine with no apparent purpose but to torture him was missing for no apparent reason – and second, that someone had made several significant additions to his surroundings. He loathed being kept in the dark, fearing what would come next. He racked his brain, searching for clues.

Thinking back to the last time he was awake, he recalled nothing out of the ordinary. He spent that day (or night, or whatever it was) doing what he normally did. When he was first brought to the cell he was unable to get up from pain and labored breathing, but as he recovered he began trying to carry on functioning. He didn’t know much about medicine, but he did know that walking was important, so he did just that. He ate the food that appeared on the table, showered under the pitiful spigot in the other corner, utilized the humiliatingly open-to-the-air facilities, and sat on the table. He hummed songs he barely remembered and tried not to give in to the temptation to bash his skull against the wall.

As far as he knew, he hadn’t done anything objectionable lately. This didn’t seem likely to be a punishment. Whatever reason they had for sedating him and changing his surroundings, it wasn’t a reaction to what he’d done.

Who “they” were was still unclear. He gathered that they were these Celet people and that they were watching him. He hated them very much. They kept him in a constant low-level state of capping, a state of mild pain which rendered his powers useless, which made it impossible for him to turn against them. The headache from the weaponized kelsparused to cap him was as constant a companion as Cold Steel, a dull throb at the base of his skull.

Teveres sighed loudly. With the bubbles gone his own breath was the only sound in the room. He would give anything to talk to anyoneelse – Celet, Kaldari, or otherwise. The last time he saw or spoke to another soul was the day he was shot…

His chest tightened at the memory. Focus on something else, damn it. He had enough nightmares about it; no need to dwell on it during waking times, as well.

Groaning, he writhed against the restraints. His half-hearted escape attempt was all in vain. The leather straps were unyielding. Stuck – but why?

“What do you want from me?” he called out into the solitude.

He waited, but no reply came. They were watching him, for certain, somewhere out there – watching, but never talking.

“We’re all waiting,” he continued anyway. His words were louder and clearer than usual with the tube removed. The improvement was mildly encouraging. “I love these conversations we have, you know. It’s been a while. Maybe you could contribute?” he looked up at the slab ceiling. Part of him worried about becoming a mad man; the other part was convinced he already was. “I try not to complain, but I would like it if you’d take the needle out next time. Fucking burns, if you didn’t know.” The burning was getting worse, it seemed, and as it did the headache started to go away for the first time in what felt like forever.

The silence dragged on. His eyes fluttered closed. Perhaps if he tried, he could push the pain away and go back to sleep. It was a much better alternative than staring at the mirror.

CLANG. The sound that echoed through the room reminded him of a shot from the pistolet. He cried out in surprise, his heart racing. His eyes snapped open to darkness as the dull high of adrenaline consumed him.

He scoured the blackness for an answer. The only source of light came from the mirror… which was no longer a mirror. It had transformed into a window, the work of some dark magic. Suddenly he was not alone.

A woman sat opposite him through the glass, strapped down to a very familiar table. Short-cropped black hair framed a young face, her features small and delicate. She was perhaps 18, wearing only underthings; her coffee-colored skin was bathed in bright white light.

When Teveres’s gaze met hers he couldn’t look away. Her eyes were decidedly gray, the color of summer storms, too large for her small face. Tears glimmered in the light and trailed over her cheeks. Her eyes were pleading with him as her body shook. Her lips mouthed silent words: ‘Don’t do it.”

Panting, Teveres struggled harder against his own restraints. The straps squealed against his skin and jabbed into his ribs. The initial joy of seeing another human being was replaced by dread. Something bad was about to happen. He felt fear, but the fear was not his own. He was feeling her fear. The capping was starting to lift in earnest.

A second figure stepped out from the darkness to stand next to the girl. The figure wore a black, eyeless mask, and dark clothing. Gloved hands wrapped around a pistolet, leveled at the young woman’s skull. The girl hung her head.

Teveres broke out in a sweat. There was so much fear and rage around him and within him that he couldn’t sort it. He wished that he could share in Aia’s divinity long enough to get a better picture of what was happening. His mind-reading abilities were sadly insufficient. He looked skyward again.

“What do you want?” he bellowed up at the nebulous Them. “What is this supposed to be?” This time his cries were met with an answer of sorts. If Cold Steel had not been bolted down, Teveres would have toppled backwards at the sudden, sharp physical pain that emanated from beyond the glass. The young woman began screaming loud enough that the sounds seeped through to his cell. Teveres’s heart flew to his throat trying to block it out. Nothing touched her and the pistolet had not gone off… yet her agony was unmatched. His skin prickled as the lost flame of his divinity began to warm him, a slow kindle building to a raging fire.

Her pain consumed him, threatening to break him. A sound between a roar and a scream built in his gut until it exploded from his lips.

“Do you want a fight?” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Is that what you fucking want? Come down here and take me!”

His mind stuttered when the masked figure advanced to press the pistolet against her head. The barrel of the weapon touching her temple destroyed his last vestige of his control. Teveres let go of the leash, the fire within blazing through the masked figure’s life energy.

He didn’t need to see the evidence of his work. His eyes rolled back in his head and a blissful wave of pleasure soaked him. The pain, the fear, the rage all went away. The high of killing always disgusted him, but this time he let it take over, even as the guilt clawed at him, panic threatening to shatter his reprieve.

Gods, demons, anyone, please…take me away from here. In his ecstasy, he wept.

Tragedy has an interesting past that I don’t think I’ve shared before. The very first scene was written when I was 15, just after I completed my first (never-to-be-published) novel, 4012. Teveres was originally created as a gray-morals character to be featured in 4012‘s sequel (which I never wrote), a contrast to the story’s heroine. Teveres was someone from another planet, as this was more on the sci-fi side of speculative fiction, and his situation came to me in one picture: a powerful young man with green-and-gold eyes, face-down in the dirt after the brutal murder of his family. He was supposed to end up running away and meeting 4012’s heroine.Six years later I was inspired to create Aia’s character, and in the process stumbled upon this scene on my hard drive – it just so happened that Teveres was exactly the kind of person the story needed. The life-and-death duo of Aiasjia and Teveres, born out of story fragments. Oddly enough the scene which brought Teveres into this story just didn’t really fit in the final product, and was cut during the editing phase.It’s not much, but here’s a little blast from the hidden past: the prologue that never was.

When Teveres hit the ground outside his father’s plantation, he stayed there. Like a slave, like a beaten child, like a rodent he dug his hands and knees into the ground, letting the dirt agitate the skin beneath his fingernails. Spittle dropped from his lips to the moistened soil; he could feel his tongue sending a river of blood down his throat that choked him.

Ignorant fools.

The men and women of the city – his city – cackled around him. They were more like animals than people, circling him in his weakest time. He grew up in their presence, helped them educate their children and tend their fields, yet they lacked the basic decency to treat him like a fellow human being. They disgusted him.

In his fury, he caught only fragments of words. “Whore, just like his mother,” “Slimy son of a bitch,” “Dirty,” “Arrogant,” “Blight-touched,” the words just kept dribbling from their unbridled mouths.

Hair dripping from the rain, he began to shiver. “I’m asking you to stop,” his voice was low-pitched and eerily controlled. The undercurrent of rage was lost on the mob.

“And what will you do, my lord?” the farmer called, “your lands have been taken. Your house is in ruins. You are nothing.”

They think it was me. How could they think this was me?

A woman hit him in the head with a farming implement. His ears rang and his vision blurred, drowning out everything but his sense of touch. Someone spat on him.

“Don’t make me do this,” he hissed.

When one of the men kicked him, Teveres didn’t move. He didn’t have to. He breathed in, out, calmed his heartbeat and closed his eyes. When he finally looked up to the chalk-colored skies, the ringing in his ears was gone and everything was still. The townspeople all lay quietly, peacefully deceased. A smile made a hesitant tug at Teveres’s lips.

He fled.

In other news, I am now 108,000 words deep in Forsaken Lands 2… and it’s still not done. Maybe this month, my friends. Maybe this month.

I was overwhelmingly inspired this evening, my first totally free evening following the completion of wicked medical licensing examination part 3! Now that my exam is over my fingers are itching. This is a cut scene between Elden and Aia in Forsaken Lands 2 – you can read it here or not at all. 😉 Folks who have already read Broken may find this particularly interesting. There are minimal spoilers, however, if you’re super anti-spoiler you may want to avert your eyes for now.

I will be in touch later this week, you can be sure! More Fae and Folly is on the agenda. Until then…

“This girl you keep dreaming about…”

“Lyda,” when I said her name it came out all crackly, not smooth at all. I threaded my fingers in my hair like it would keep Aia from listening to my thoughts. I couldn’t tell when she was and when she wasn’t, which was about the most unnerving thing I’d ever experienced, let me tell you. Usually when a person unnerved me it made me avoid them, like the dealers on the streets that I wouldn’t even buy from because of their crazy eyes. Aia unnerved me like that, and at the same time made me feel a little better about myself. I couldn’t figure on why.

She shifted a little closer to me, the ocean wind blowing her hair so I couldn’t see her face. It was real dark out here in the middle of the ocean. The water below us was like an abyss, and in it I could almost see Lyda’s face. You could see anything you wanted down there.

“I don’t really mean to pry,” she started pulling her hair back in a bun the way she usually had it, “but sometimes you just… when you’re upset like that I tend to listen in. Makes me worried.”

I guessed if she could really feel and hear things the way she claimed to she would have all kinds of reasons to be concerned. I’d been dreaming about Lyda a lot lately, probably because I’d been half-sober most of the time since hooking up with Garren. Except that one night at the outpost, obviously, but that was just generally a mistake.

“Sorry,” was all I could say to that. I glanced to one side, thinking that maybe I could come up with an excuse to leave.

“No need,” her little smile was kind of cute, if a little sad. A lot of people smiled at me like that over the years. “I… am really curious about who she is. All I get are bits and pieces when you dream. There’s obviously a story there.”

She wasn’t asking for anything directly, which I took to mean that I could disappear right then if I wanted. Fool that I was, I didn’t leave. She kind of deserved an explanation after saving my ass all those times. Three times, I think. I was losing count.

“Lyda and me grew up together,” I said, and felt myself detach from what I was saying. I just went numb. “She was… my best friend. We were really close, till the day I left.”

“When you left home.”

“Yeah, then.” Aia knew most of what happened when I left Chall, or as much as I told anyone about it.

“So what’s the rest of the story?” She didn’t look at me, maybe to make me more comfortable.

I sighed. “I kind of… you know, I loved her.”

I had to shut my mouth, then, because I hadn’t said that out loud in a couple years at least. I’d told some guy once after we were together, cause he was asking about my history. It helped that I was drunk at the time. I wasn’t drunk now, though, so maybe that was why it felt like I’d just stabbed myself in the gut.

Aia just nodded. She had to have already figured that out from the dreams. I didn’t remember them all, but I know at least a couple were about the day I left, when I asked her to forget me. Sometimes I wondered if she really forgot. She would have been better off if she did.

“You keep dreaming about her in Feya,” Aia’s voice got very soft, almost too soft for me to hear. “I thought you grew up on the border.”

“Feya was the last place I saw her,” I reached in my pockets hoping to find some covash, distantly remembering that I’d already traded it away. My fingers fidgeted all around, like maybe if I fidgeted hard enough I would magically summon some of the stuff. I started speaking instead, and the words went way too fast. I didn’t even realize what I was saying as I was saying it. “Bout a year after I went in the wind I ended up in Feya. That was just before I went on my tear up the eastern coast, see, and I wasn’t doing so great. It was almost night…”

My breath hitched, and Aia was looking at me with those serious, piercing eyes, and I don’t think there was any way for me to run at that point. I had to keep going. “I knew where she’d be. Lyda was real smart, had an apprenticeship offer in Feya before I left. Wanted to be an alchemist. I went to lots of shops that day, but I was… well, high. About as high as I usually was back then, which was worse than when you met me, for sure. I had this dumb idea that I would walk up to her and say hello, you know, like nothing happened. So I ended up at this place that was down by the water, and I saw her. She had a basket in her hands, probably from the market, and she looked real good. She had new clothes and her hair was in a braid, which she’d never done before. I got all ready to go up and see her, and…” I shook my head. I wasn’t going to cry, not now in front of Aia, but if I was on anything I probably would have been bawling at that point. Thank the gods I had some restraint left in me. “I looked down and I was just a mess. I couldn’t walk up to her like that, filthy, piece of shit that I am. Then as I was starting to turn around – you know, to leave – this guy walked up to her. I don’t remember anything about the guy. I just remember that she smiled real wide, the way she used to smile with me, and she kissed him.”

I went quiet. It was a boring story, I thought, for anyone but me. Why should anyone get all excited about some girl they never even fucked kissing some guy? Lyda deserved to be happy. She deserved it a lot more than I ever did.

I don’t think Aia found it boring, though, with the way her eyebrows were all knitted together. “Skies, but that must have hurt.”

I shrugged. More than I can say.

“Have you thought about going to look for her again, now that you’re doing better?”

I managed to chuckle. “Sweetheart, I think you might be forgetting the week I’ve had. I’m nobody’s definition of ‘better.’”

“You’re never going to be perfect, especially not in your own head. That doesn’t mean you have to cut her out of your life forever.”

“It’s been four years, and I’m halfway across the world from her. For all I know she died along with everyone else in the earthquake.” I said it like it was a fact, easy, the way a person would talk about some random lurker on the street getting killed. On the inside it made my heart thump so bad I thought it might come out of my chest. I don’t know what I would have done if I knew for certain she’d died. I think I might have lost it again, the way I lost it when I was sixteen, and that could only be worse. I could do a lot more damage now than I could back then.

“Hm,” in her eyes I could see that Aia was coming up with some kind of plan, but I didn’t care to hear what it was. It was probably some high-minded idea that she could go find Lyda when we got back home. I didn’t want to tell her how frightened that idea made me, first because if Lyda was alive I would have to explain what happened to me, and second if Lyda was dead I would have to deal with the fallout of knowing.

“Don’t know why you care so much about all this,” I shook my head, “my problems don’t have to be yours, too.”

“Would it make you feel better to hear some stories about my shitty past?” she grinned, and it made me snort out a laugh. I didn’t know she was one to swear at all, but maybe I was rubbing off on her.

“Maybe,” I said, more than happy to get away from all my own problems. “I wouldn’t guess you made the sort of mistakes I did, though. You’re a good person.”

The grin dissipated, and suddenly she was somebody else, somebody with a totally different story than the one I’d constructed for her in my head. The grin didn’t go away completely, but it changed to a new kind of smile, one that I’d seen on people who knew things that no one should.

I am very pleased to announce that Broken is now liveon Amazon! You can check it out here.

Sixteen-year-old Elden is a young man driven by impulse. A natural telekinetic raised by strict disciplinarians, he has struggled all his life to be what anyone expected him to be. On the eve of his brother’s induction into Justice training Elden faces a series of crucial choices, the outcome of which will determine his future in ways he never imagined.

This 20,000-word novella contains a significant level of explicit language and descriptions of substance abuse.

In other news, progress continues on FL2 as well as the Fae and Follyserial (as you can plainly see from previous posts!). However… I will be starting on a hardcore internal medicine rotation on Monday which will last until August 25th. Between the shock of (finally) being a new doctor and pulling 70-80 hour weeks, I may kind of disappear.

Maybe.

There’s also a chance that I will cling to my fantasy world so closely that you’ll get sick of me. It could really go either way at this point. I just wanted to let you all know in case it turns out to be the former – even if I’m in hospital wards purgatory for the next 8 weeks, I can assure you that nothing will keep me from writing on a longterm basis. Eventually my time on internal med will end, and I will go back to the comfort and safety of my chosen specialty.

Until then, please enjoy the novella! If you have thoughts on it – good or not-so-good – your reviews would be welcome. Reviews are an indie writer’s lifeblood!